The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

Saturday, September 03, 2016

America: The Indispensable Nation…Not!

If there’s one core belief that has
guided and inspired me every step of the way, it is this. The United States is
an exceptional nation…And part of what makes America an exceptional nation, is
that we are also an indispensable nation.

In fact, we are the indispensable
nation. People all over the world look to us and follow our lead.

Her speech was another episode in the chronicle of Clintonian triangulation:
the continual search for positions that co-opt and neutralize critics of
Clinton and Clintonian policies.And by
declaring the “indispensable nation” doctrine, Hillary Clinton convincingly shed
the pro-peace/anti-military incubus that had bedeviled the Democratic Party and
her family over the last three decades and seized the “strength and security”
a.k.a. “warmonger” mantle from the GOP.

Her husband, Bill Clinton, had encountered unique
difficulties as the first US president not to have served in the military in
some capacity in World War II.In fact,
he had taken advantage of a student deferment to avoid induction into the military
during the Vietnam War.His first visit
as president to a military installation as president subjected him to excruciating
mockery and virtual insubordination.Joke: “A protester threw a beer at the president.Don’t worry, he dodged it.It was a draft.”

Barack Obama, another Democratic president withoutmilitary credentials, was flayed
in his first and second presidential campaigns for his perceived indifference
to “American exceptionalism,” an unscientific exercise in patriotic
superstition and Hegelian projection which, in that context, was seen as the
assertion that the unlimited exercise of US power was, perhaps through the
moral superiority of our nation and its system, perhaps because of some divine
mandate, inherently virtuous.

As a black man aware of America’s heritage of slavery and
the disaster of the Iraq War, President Obama attempted to separate American
exceptionalism from its jingoistic roots and, instead of discarding it,
redefined it as an indefatigable national impulse to overcome obstacles,
errors, and injustice to progress as a nation.Call it “Practical” or “Scientific” Exceptionalism.

President Obama laid out his vision at a speech at the
Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 2015.The hagiographic Washington Post coverage declared:

Its essence amounted
to a rebuttal of Ronald Reagan’s famous “City on a Hill” speech [which] sketched
a vision of an America that was nearly without flaw.

The United States is
an exceptional nation. I believe we are still Lincoln’s last, best hope of
Earth. We’re still Reagan’s shining city on a hill. We’re still Robert
Kennedy’s great, unselfish, compassionate country.

In Clinton’s vision we are not, I might say, the country
that screws up big time… like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did in Libya,
for instance.

The determined efforts of the Clinton campaign to scuttle
away from its flagbearer’s dismal Libyan legacy is one of the many moments of
low comedy in this presidential campaign.

When Clinton was Secretary of State, a Libyan triumph was
expected to serve as the tentpole foreign policy achievement for her presidential
run.Instead, Libya descended into
anarchy, became a crucial origination point and waystation for transnational
Islamic militants, and emerged as a nexus of destabilization for North Africa.

Which makes this statement by Clinton rather ironic:

When America fails to lead, we leave a
vacuum that either causes chaos or other countries or networks rush in to fill
the void. So no matter how hard it gets, no matter how great the challenge,
America must lead.

With the Libyan fiasco unexploitable, Clinton was reduced to
touting her purported agency in giving President Obama the backbone to kill bin
Laden as her signature FP moment.

President Obama generously gave her the credit.Equally generously, he declined to blame her
misjudgment for the Libya intervention she so vociferously advocated and, in
fact, seems to be engaged in a hurried military exercise to suppress the ISIS
franchise in Libya and prevent further Libya-related attention and
embarrassment for the Clinton campaign.

In her politics, I believe Clinton is an instinctive and
indefatigable frontrunner, determined to push her way to the front of the
biggest parade and claim to be leading it, consequences be damned.In the US, that parade organized by the
Pentagon and it marches overseas in pursuit of power and profit.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, America in Clinton’s view is not
only “exceptional” it is “indispensable,” despite the rather compelling
evidence that MENA in general could have "dispensed" with America’s attentions,
as Libya found Hillary Clinton “indispensable” in its dismal quest to devolve
from a prosperous, well-functioning oil satrapy to an anarchic and immiserated boot
camp for militants presided over by three competing regimes.

Even as
the United States tried to “lead” and shape the destinies of states with populations
in the tens of millions, it has become the strategic plaything of Israel,
Saudi Arabia...and Turkey.

Turkey!Which went
ahead and invaded Syria to put the hurt on America’s Kurdish allies/assets even
though…well, maybe because…it’s a US ally.Which is now playing footsie with Russia, the power it’s supposed to be
containing as a key NATO force.

“Indispensability,” however, is not just a feel-good soundbite; it has the savor of one of those over-ruminated and underdigested think tank efforts that mark the path of the Clinton campaign like so many expensive road apples.

The interesting and rather ignored subtext of the “indispensable”
formula is that it is actually a step back from “dominant” or “hegemonic.” Remember “full
spectrum dominance”?Maybe not, but that
was the Rumsfeld formula declaring the United States military could do it all
and we shouldn’t be afraid to wield US power unilaterally.That came a cropper in Iraq, so we don’t do
that anymore.

"Indispensable," while projecting a reassuring aura of chesty invincibility to the masses, is supposed to signal to the cognoscenti we are aware of the limits of
unilateral power and instead do what we can to structure the battlespace favorably
to allocate power between competing and supporting actors so we can inject
decisive force when we want to/need to.

This formulation is clearly applicable to dealing with the rise of
China in particular and Asia in general, a region, very unlike MENA, of relatively high-functioning states with populations numbering in the hundreds of millions and billions.As US relative strength declines and China muscles up, there’s a clear
understanding that the US cannot stay on top by itself.It needs allies—like India and Japan.

The United States may have bid adieu to dominance in Asia; but it will find it hard to uphold even the
illusion of US indispensability as its relative strength continues to decline
vis a vis Japan and India as well as China; these countries set up their own
security regimes that, as needed, complement or exclude the US; and the
economic and security costs of creating a “leading” and “indispensable” role
for the United States in Asia continue to escalate.

“Indispensability” is the secret sauce for burgeoning
Pentagon budgets and ambitious politicians.And of course the more unworkable the objective, the more money has to
be spent to try and attain it.Ka-ching!

But it’s not a recipe for regional stability and
prosperity.Fact is, the US already has
to degrade the regional security order to secure a decisive American role.If you don’t believe me, look at the US
policy, actually non-policy, on North Korea.

And look at the US pouring conventional (and in the future,
probably tactical nuclear) military capabilities into the Asian theater to
deter our allies from going nuclear themselves and eliminating the true
foundation of US “indispensability”: its nuclear monopoly a.k.a. the “nuclear
umbrella” over the China-containment regime.

The dark side of sustaining "indispensability" is that the United
States, as its relative power declines, has to try to reshape and
restrain the capabilities and ambitions of its
allies, as well as China, in order to preserve the “indispensable” role
for
American power. That's a losing battle with India and Japan.

I understand Hillary Clinton wanted to get her national
security ticket punched with voters and with the military/industrial/security
complex.But trying to keep the United
States “indispensable” will probably cost us trillions in the decades to come,
guarantees polarization and tensions in Asia, and will probably start a war or
two. And it will end in failure, albeit probably after Hillary Clinton has left office and a generation of officers and analysts have paid off their summer homes and their kids' college loans.

“Indispensability,” despite its pretensions to realism and practicality, comes with a big price tag, maybe even
the end of the American empire it is designed to prolong.